Unreal Animation: An Interview with Mainframe Studio’s Game Engine Pioneers
It’s a classic story of invention: someone looks at a familiar tool, applies it to an unexpected problem in an unexpected way, and opens a door that didn’t exist before. In this case, Mainframe Studio’s Steven Elford and Marcel Simons flipped a program used to create video games on its head to create ReBoot: The Guardian Code, one of the first television shows made in the Unreal Engine. Now the studio is stretching Unreal to its limits to push the medium of animation, with Elford and Simons in the vanguard.
Andie: How did both of you find your way to Mainframe? Steven Elford, VP Creative Technology: I was making puppets for the movie Mars Attacks. We were building martians, and then all of a sudden the company that was making the movie decided that they want to do everything with CGI. That was my inkling into the fact that the industry was changing. I went down to work in Bristol [UK] for various companies that made props and parts of puppets for Aardman Animations, then I went on to work at Aardman. While I was there, I transitioned from doing puppet-making into CG. I went back to London to work on the first CG movie made in the UK, and then from there I went to work in Toronto on the first CG feature made in Canada. Then I got dragged up to Mainframe and I came over on a three month contract -- that was seven years ago.
Isn't that just how it always happens. Marcel, did you take an equally circuitous route? Marcel Simons, CG Supervisor: You could say so. When Steen was at Aardman Commercials, I was working on the CG side for them. I think we joined up to work on a couple of commercials, but we then went our separate ways again. I was staying in computer games until I got a call from him asking whether I wanted to help out on the new Bob the Builder. And I said yes, so I came over to Vancouver four years ago. My idea of using a game engine on a television show percolated in his mind and I happened to be here with my games background and I was kind of dragged into it. Steven: Ever since I was worked at Aardman I’ve been asking the question: why does no one ever use a game engine? But back then it really wasn't feasible. At Mainframe I downloaded a version of Unreal and did some testing with it, and then I accidentally showed it to the president of the company. And he's like, “That looks good, let's do that!”
Could you explain for us humanities majors in the peanut gallery what Mainframe uses Unreal for and how it's integrated into the production pipeline? Steven: A lot of the reason people struggle to use a game engine is that they try to cram it into their current pipeline. What we did, which I think was different, was we looked at the strength of the game engine and we tried to fit the two pipelines around each other. Marcel: We use Unreal at the midpoint of a normal production, when we have the animations and the assets. Then we basically set up the shots in the game engine. Steven: The strength for us was being able to show the director or the creators the assets in real time. Rather than showing a render and getting comments on a render, we could actually show them the asset and they could say things like, “What if that was blue instead of red?” And then we could go in and tweak it. They'd be able to sit at the desk for a couple of hours and see the consequences of their suggestions almost instantly.
What was the process of introducing it on the studio floor? Was the whole concept coming out of left field for a lot of people or was everyone receptive? Steven: People were familiar with what Unreal was because it’s- I won't say it’s a nerdy industry, but a lot of people play games. Oh, it's definitely a nerdy industry. Self-proclaimed. Steven: The first project we did was ReBoot, which is a live-action show with CG in it. The original ReBoot was the first ever CG TV series back in ‘94, and we wanted to capture that feeling of doing something before anyone else had. We looked around internally to see who had experience doing stuff in the game engine and who wanted to switch over and learn; we hired some people from outside of the studio that had experience in areas where we didn't. And we just went for it, really. In an ideal world, you have a long time up front to build everything and test everything, but in reality when you're in a production you’ve just got to get on with it. People had to switch their mindset slightly because in a traditional pipeline, you get the “We’ll fix it in composite” mentality. Since we were doing everything essentially through a camera, we had to explain, “Well, no you can't do that, and this is why, and here are your alternatives.” People re-learned how to look at things and re-learned what was achievable. Marcel: You have to take much more of a live action mindset. The first couple of episodes of ReBoot were certainly tricky, but by the time we got to the end we were in a real flow.
Now that the studio has acclimatized working in Unreal, what’s being cooked up in the game engine for the future? Steven: When we finished working on ReBoot we continued leveraging the game engine by making a series of VR 360 shorts, which are on YouTube. We’ve just finished doing a test for a potential new project using the game engine and we're starting another test next week for another show with more of a cartoony feeling about it. We're also looking at options to create AR characters- augmented reality characters. That's the interesting thing about this: a traditional CG pipeline always has shows going through it, but for this one we want to make sure we pick the right shows because it's still a new process. We want to pick the shows that we know we can do well. It's got to be the right paintbrush for the right kind of painting. Marcel: It's not as easy as people think it is! Steven: I think they were quite surprised at what we did with it. We wrote things for the game engine that didn't exist. Unreal is pushing the cinematic approach, so it feels like we're doing this at the right time.
-- Andie Newell